Mick Jagger defends the Rolling Stones' exorbitant ticket priced for their four London and New Jersey shows. The top-tiered ticket, which topped out at over $800, has quadrupled in price on the black market, depending on which scalper is selling the seats. Jagger spoke about the ticket controversy to Rolling Stone and defended the price of the seats, explaining, "I don't think there should be a secondary ticket market. I don't think it should be legal. To my mind, there has to be a better way of doing it, but we're living, really, with the way the system functions. We can't, in four shows, change the whole ticketing system."

He went on to say: "You might say, 'The tickets are too expensive' -- well, it's a very expensive show to put on, just to do four shows, because normally you do a hundred shows and you'd have the same expenses. So, yes, it's expensive. But most of the tickets go for a higher price than we've sold them for, so you can see the market is there. We don't participate in the profit. If a ticket costs 250 quid ($400), let's imagine, and goes for 1,000 quid ($1,600), I just want to point out that we don't get that difference."

IN OTHER STONES RELATED NEWS

Actress-singer Marsha Hunt, Mick Jagger's late-'60s girlfriend and mother to his first child, Karis, is auctioning off the Stones frontman's old love letters. Hunt, who claims to be the original inspiration for "Brown Sugar," spoke frankly to The Guardian as to why she's selling off the letters, saying: "I'm broke." The letters, in which Jagger talks openly about his split with Marianne Faithfull and the death of Brian Jones, will go under the hammer on December 12th at Sotheby's and earn Hunt up to $160,000.

Noted rock author Phillip Norman is getting positive notices for his new Jagger biography, Mick. We asked him whether he thinks Jagger was curious enough to read the book himself: "I just don't know. I mean, his policy is, of course, not to read or acknowledge anything. Somebody might say, 'This is a bit different, and perhaps you should look at it.' But I just do not know. I'd be perfectly happy for him to read it; I think he has quite good literary taste. He read (my Beatles book) Shout!, because he corrected me on a percentage figure when I went to talk to him backstage once. But I don't know if he read anything else."